The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War. The mass killings are widely regarded as part of a broad state-sponsored genocide which is the Cambodian genocide. The 20,000 mass grave sites indicate at least 1,386,734 victims of execution. Estimates of the total deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including death from disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million. There are also around 8,00 skulls are on display in a glass shrine at the memorial building that stands in the center of the killing fields.
The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Thai, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Cham, Cambodian Christians, and Buddhist monks were the demographic targets of persecution. As a result, Pol Pot has been described as “a genocidal tyrant”. All the tormented souls of the men, women, and also children killed at the fields are said to haunt to this day.
